In the Night Season

Nora Michaelson and her eleven-year-old son, Jason. are going through a difficult adjustment to life after the accidental death of Jason's father. at a time when the family's small business was failing. The loss of Jack Michaelson has left his wife and son nearly destitute. It has also placed their lives in jeopardy. This is a story of terror, and

Overview

Nora Michaelson and her eleven-year-old son, Jason. are going through a difficult adjustment to life after the accidental death of Jason's father. at a time when the family's small business was failing. The loss of Jack Michaelson has left his wife and son nearly destitute. It has also placed their lives in jeopardy. This is a story of terror, and resourcefulness in the face of terror, from a master storyteller.

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Editorial Reviews

Boston Globe

Pulse-racing suspense...Bausch has long been one of the most expert and substantial of our writers.

People

Powerful...penetrating...a darkly brilliant thriller.

New York Times Book Review

Wry and exacting . . . a brutal and relentless thriller.

Men's Journal

As taut as a headstay in a gale.

Richmond Times-Dispatch

A white-knuckle ride, a thriller that sets its hook on page one.

A. O. Scott

Richard Bausch...is prized as a wry and exacting anatomist of relationships, with a special gift for creating vivid and offbeat characters and placing them in revealing, unexpected situations. -- New York Times Book Review

Library Journal

Bausch (Good Evening, Mr. and Mrs. America, LJ 8/96) is a widely admired writer of considerable talent. But he's off his mark in this tale of a family nearing bankruptcy, the death of the husband in an accident, and the terror visited upon his survivors when his "associates" come for the stolen smuggled goods he's hidden, reneging on his part of the deal. The plot is canned; the action, especially how two of the villains manage to do each other in, often strains credibility; and the characters seem to have wandered in variously from McCrumb, Pelecanos, and even Grisham novels. All that said, the writing itself is good, and the book is decidedly a page turner; in spite of (and perhaps even because of) its flaws, it's hard to put down. Surely not essential, but buy if the budget allows for Bausch fans and Grishamites.Robert E. Brown, Onondaga Cty. P.L., Syracuse, NY

Lambert

With his powerful style and penetrating sense of characters, Bausch keeps us hooked even through stretches of almost excruciating tension and sporadic violence that some readers may find excessive.
- Pam Lambert, People Weekly Magazine

Kirkus Reviews

Bausch's eighth (Good Evening Mr. & Mrs. America and all the Ships at Sea, 1996, etc.) is a standard-issue thriller probably modeled on the grisly "entertainments" of David Martin. The foreground action offers one of the most elaborate red herrings to be found in the genre: a friendship between widowed schoolteacher Nora Michaelson and black TV repairman Edward Bishop that offends neighbors in their small Virginia town and makes both recipients of hate mail from the white supremacist Virginia Front. Nora and her 11-year-old son Jason are held hostage in their home by a pair of gunmen; Bishop is simultaneously terrorized in his own homeand, as Bausch deftly expands the narrative, Nora's parents Henry and Gwendolyn Spencer are held captive in their Seattle home by Ricky, a nervous "associate" of the Virginia abductors. It's soon enough clear that that interracial friendship has nothing to do with the plotwhich involves stolen computer chips held by Nora's late husband, whose "old army buddies" have come to reclaim them. Of course, the detective investigating a reported disturbance that looks like a hate crime is himself the victim of a failed marriage and of blocked communication with his beloved daughtersþand Bausch obligingly tightens the screws on both coasts. The Michaelsons' oppressors are pure Hollywood types: the (late-arriving) Reuther, suave German mastermind; tough guy Travis, who has sexual designs on the feisty Nora; and his gross, murderous brother "Bags," the nightmarish pursuer of plucky young Jason. Few clich‚s are left unturned in a made-to-order melodrama that's reminiscent, at various times, of "The Desperate Hours," "The Purloined Letter," and"Wait Until Dark." A predictable climactic bloodbath involves two of the malefactors, a last-minute rescue, and an unbelievably contrivedþand maudlinþending. If Bausch is trying to sell this as serious fiction, he should be ashamed of himself. If he's taking a break from more purely literary endeavors and seeking the big bucks, more power to him. Writing the screenplay should be a breeze.

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Read an Excerpt

The Hour of Brightest Afternoon

During the fall, a group calling itself the Virginia Front began a hate campaign aimed at what might accurately, if with dismay, be called the traditional targets for such things at the end of the American century. The campaign took the form of letters and circulars, threats, mostly, the product of desktop publishing, with crude color graphics--doubtless the work, said the commonwealth attorney, of a coterie of nutcases with a computer, shaved heads, and a book. The book, predictably enough, was Mein Kampf. The circulars began arriving on the desks of various county officials and in the regular mail of some citizens, including several people the Front evidently considered worth addressing directly--people whose publicly stated opinions or whose behavior the group found wanting in terms of their very specific and obvious agenda.

One of these was Edward Bishop, a TV and VCR repairman who made house calls in the county and kept a small workshop in his home, an old farmhouse on five acres of grass and trees above Steel Run Creek. Mr. Bishop had made no public statements, and he was not a public figure, really, though almost everyone in Fauquier County knew him. His family went all the way back to the eighteenth century in this part of Virginia, though their position, back then, and on into the middle of the nineteenth century, was understood in law and in the minds of almost everyone as being no more or less than property--chattel, salable goods, as Mr. Bishop would occasionally put it, when his long family history came up. "This is, after all," he would say, "a former slave state."

He described himself as a black American.He had served in Vietnam and been wounded--there was a piece of shrapnel still lodged in the bone of his left leg, just above the ankle--and he had a Purple Heart, a Bronze Star for valor. He was fifty-six years old, enjoyed a good business, and was trusted by a large clientele. Indeed, he was taken for granted by a lot of people: a quiet man, even a loner of sorts, who went his own way. A man with the self-sufficiency and the slightly eccentric attitude of someone used to falling back on his own resources.

He had recently formed a friendship with the young white woman who lived in a neighboring house, perhaps six hundred yards away down Steel Run Creek Road. He walked over there in the late afternoons, during the week, to spend time with her eleven-year-old son--actually, to provide adult supervision for the boy, who was unused to coming home to an empty house. When she arrived from her job teaching in town, Mr. Bishop sometimes stayed to dinner. It was often well after dark before he made his way back down the road to his own house. He had not spoken about this arrangement with many people, other than the clerk at the local Country Store, and his housekeeper, who happened also to be white.

But someone had seen him, or the boy had said something at his school, and word had got out to the Virginia Front.

And one morning in late November, Mr. Bishop found in his mailbox a message in boldface type, on the letterhead of the organization, written over an ugly graphic of a hanging black man with bugged-out eyes and a very red tongue:

Watch your step with the white woman. We are.

It was not signed, nor had it been mailed. Someone had come by and put it there, folded like a business letter. He stood gazing at it, in the chill of the morning, and then looked up and down the road. The innocent countryside seemed abruptly almost alien to him, as though it contained some element of the poison he held in his hand. He folded it back and put it in his pocket. He intended to ignore it. But it troubled him; it made him feel as though some border of his privacy had been violated, and later in the day he drove over to the county police headquarters. He spoke to a detective named Shaw, a thin, graying man, perhaps forty-five, with tired, sad eyes and a manner that seemed rather tentative. They sat in a warm, too-tidy office, while sunny wind shook the windows. People rushed around in the street below, collars turned up against the cold. Edward Bishop thought about all the comfortable assumptions of safety. A big bank of dark clouds was moving in from the west. It looked like the encroachment of trouble to him.

"Do you think this is a real threat?" Shaw said, rubbing the flesh on either side of his nose. Bishop noted that there were thin forking veins in the red cheeks. It was a rough, hard-living face which, in the circumstances, did nothing to reassure him. He wished for someone younger.

"Of course it's a real threat," he said. "I feel threatened. That makes it a threat. I think somebody must be watching me. I haven't been talking to anybody, or said anything. I watch the lady's kid for her in the afternoons. I'm her neighbor. She's run up on some bad luck, and I've been helping her out."

The detective folded his hands on the desk. "It wouldn't be anybody's business if there was more to it than that, Mr. Bishop."

"Yeah, but there isn't. Her husband died in February. He didn't leave any insurance and she had to go back to work. The kid's started messing up in school."

"I'm saying this isn't anybody's business but yours, sir."

"I know that. You don't need to tell me that. I'm just telling you what the situation is. Somebody thinks it's their business. And I can't figure out how in the hell these people know I'm spending any time over there unless they're watching me."

"Is the boy okay with you coming over?"

"I think so. He seems all right about it. If he isn't he's fooled me good."

"And there's nobody else--"

"My housekeeper. I've been carrying her, though. She knows I can't really use her, and I've been paying her anyway. She comes in twice a week. She needs the money--there's no motive for her. It has to be that somebody's watching me."

Meet the Author

Richard Bausch is the author of nine other novels and seven volumes of short stories. His work has appeared in the New Yorker, the Atlantic Monthly, Esquire, Playboy, GQ, Harper's Magazine, and other publications, and has been featured in numerous best-of collections, including the O. Henry Awards' Best American Short Stories and New Stories from the South. In 2004 he won the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in the Short Story.